The transfer of India’s suite of ccTLDs from Afilias to Neustar is done.

NIXI, the .in registry, announced today: “The transition of .IN to its new Neustar-backed Registry platform is now complete.”

With 2.2 million names, not counting names in NIXI’s plethora of localized transliterations, .in is the third-largest TLD migration, behind the 3.1 million .au names that made the reverse journey from Neustar to Afilias last year and the 2.7 million .org names that went from Verisign to Afilias in 2003.

The .in migration started yesterday. NIXI had expected up to 48 hours downtime at the registry EPP level, with obviously no DNS downtime.

The name servers for .in and its IDN equivalents currently all simultaneously include Afilias-owned and Neustar-owned servers.

An Afilias lawsuit against the Indian government, which claimed Neustar lacked experience with Indian scripts and attempted to block the transition, appears to have been dropped last week.

Neustar is reportedly charging NIXI $0.70 per transaction, $0.40 less than Afilias had bid to renew its contract. It won the contract after an open bidding process last August.

The .scot gTLD registry has decided to dump the British pound as its currency of choice, due to fears over Brexit.

DotScot’s back-end, CORE, told registrars this week that it will start billing in euros from March 29.

The switch is being made due to “the expected volatility in currency exchange rates between GBP and other main currencies post-Brexit”.

March 29 is currently enshrined in UK law as the date we will formally leave the European Union, though the interminable political machinations at Westminster are making it appear decreasingly unlikely that this date could be extended.

CORE said that the prices for .scot registrations, renewals and transfers will be set at €1.14 for each £1 it currently charges. That’s the average exchange rate over the last 12 months, registrars were told.

.scot is a geographic gTLD, rather than a ccTLD, which was approved in ICANN’s 2012 application round. It has about 11,000 domains under management.

Its largest registrar, 1&1 Ionos (part of Germany’s United Internet), charges £40 a year.

Only 38% of Scots voted in favor of Brexit back in 2016, the lowest of any of the UK’s four nations, with no region of Scotland voting “Leave”.

Naturally, a great many Scots believe they’re being dragged out of the EU kicking and screaming by their ignorant, English-bastard neighbors. Which strikes me as a fair point.

The .film gTLD saw a small spike in registrations this week after dropping eligibility requirements.

The Australia-based registry, Motion Picture Domain Registry, went fully unrestricted February 22 and immediately saw at least 100 new names in its zone file.

It’s a small increase, but it meant .film, which sells for roughly $70 (101domain) to $120 (GoDaddy, its biggest channel) a year, topped 4,000 names for the first time.

It has not seen seen any additional growth since the weekend, however.

.film, from its 2015 launch, was restricted to registrants that could show a nexus to the film industry and was touted as an anti-piracy measure.

It does not appear to have been particularly well-policed, however. Its most popular domains (per Alexa rank) appear today to be piracy sites.

Despite the old restrictions, and despite being more than twice the price, .film has so far actually proved more popular than Donuts’ .movie gTLD, which has been wobbling around the 2,000 to 3,000 domain mark for the last couple of years.

I expect this is probably due to the fact that the word “film” means the same thing in many languages, whereas “movie” is a distinctly American English term.

AICPA later amended its community application to permit CPAs belonging to non-US trade groups to register.

Both organizations were caught up in the CPE review that also entangled and delayed the likes of .music and .gay. They’ve also both appealed to ICANN with multiple Requests for Reconsideration and Cooperative Engagement Process engagements.

CPA Australia evidently threw in the towel after a December 14 resolution of ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee decision to throw out its latest RfR. It quit its CEP January 9.

It’s likely a private resolution of the set, perhaps an auction, occurred in December.

The winning application from AICPA states fairly unambiguously that the body has little appetite for actually running .cpa as a gTLD:

The main reasons for which AICPA submits this application for the .cpa gTLD is that it wants to prevent third parties from securing the TLD that is identical to AICPA’s highly distinctive and reputable trademark

So don’t get too excited if you’re an accountant champing at the bit for a .cpa domain. It’s going to be an unbelievably restrictive TLD, according to the application, with AICPA likely owning all the domains for years after delegation.